Hannah Robson West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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I am an artist based in Leeds, UK, interested in the spatial qualities of textiles, how their ubiquity make them a potent marker of time, change and human life. Often overlooked in daily exchanges, they quietly carry rich meanings in their materiality, as their patterns and surfaces tell us about the people who made and used them.

I trained as a weaver, and much of my work involves creating three-dimensional forms directly on the loom to create pieces which hold their form, envelope voids of space and open out into sculptures. My work explores how textiles can amplify the elemental changes in environments: the interplay of light and shadow on a surface, subtle shifts in density and texture, and movement in currents of air. My work is designed to enhance architectural spaces, draw in light, and soft the hard lines of the built environment.

My training in textiles gives me crucial technical grounding for my work, and I am proud to be a weaver and weaving heritage is a constant source of inspiration. At the same time, I challenge the traditional notion of textiles as soft and draping, and create pieces which hold their own three-dimensional form, using materials with inherent sculptural properties such as paper, metal and plastic. The work entails constant, skilled engagement with materials and processes, exploiting and manipulating their properties to devise textiles which seem to resist or embrace the downward pull of gravity. My weaving hands are inspired by learning new textile construction techniques, careful studies of thread pathways in archival pieces, and a curiosity about the industrial engineering of complex architectural forms.